In situations with supervised environments, such as prisons, parole agencies, social welfare agencies, and schools, there is a demand for permission from clients for services, such as health care, mental health, and financial services, that can be difficult to manage. In such supervised environments, clients may not have the freedom to easily visit offices of service providers. Moreover, such clients may be expected to carry papers with them which presents a management problem, due to high rates of lost or misplaced papers, immaturity on the part of the client, uncooperative clients, and mental or physical impairments that prevent reliable exchanges of papers. At the same time, HIPAA and consent laws exist for the protection of clients and service providers so obtaining permissions and consents is a challenge. In many situations, ideally a consent would be arranged before a client actually visits a provider's office.
The ubiquity of smartphones and computer terminals can be used to address this problem. Thus, a smartphone, computer tablet, or other computing device can be used to request and capture essential information, including consent for a service that requires consent.
This invention also relies on distributed ledger technology databases for certain aspects to maintain secure record-keeping and avoid the need to clients and service providers to exchange paper documents.
Exemplary distributed ledger technologies include blockchain, Hedera Hashgraph and IOTA Tangle. A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed technology database (also termed a “ledger”) used to record transactions. Copies of the ledger are stored across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without significant effort. A blockchain has specific rules about the data added to the blockchain database. That is, data added to the blockchain cannot conflict with other data that are already in the database (it must be consistent), can only append the blockchain (it must be immutable), the data are locked to an owner (ownable), and are replicable and available. Subjects (or members) in the blockchain must agree on the database rules (canonical).1 A blockchain database is managed autonomously using a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server.
Hedera Hashgraph (HH)2 is an alternative distributed ledger technology to blockchain. The technology uses an alternative distributed consensus to blockchain. This distributed consensus allows participants who don't know or trust each other to securely collaborate and transact online without the need for a trusted intermediary. HH has certain features in common with blockchain, but HH claims to have certain advantages of performance, security, governance, and stability as compared to blockchain technologies.
Another distributed ledger is an IOTA Tangle.3 In an IOTA Tangle, transactions are not grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains, but rather are stored as a stream of individual transactions “entangled” together. In order to participate in this network, a participant simply needs to perform a small amount of computational work that verifies two previous transactions. Rather than creating a hierarchy of roles and responsibilities in the network, every actor has the same incentives and rewards. In order to make a transaction in the Tangle, two previous transactions must be validated with the reward for doing so being the validation of your own transaction by some subsequent transaction. This is said to offer significant efficiencies as compared to blockchain technologies.4 
Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies are considered to be highly secure and resistant to tampering because each record (also termed a “block”) contains a cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain, linking the two records. Thus, a block cannot be changed without altering all subsequent blocks in the chain. Thus, each record in a distributed ledger database is essentially immutable, and therefore non-repudiable. 1 For a good overview of the structure of blockchain databases, and the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain, see Jimmy Song, “Why Blockchain is Hard,” published online May 14, 2018 at https://medium.com/jimmysonq/why-blockchain-is-hard-60416ea4c5c (visited Jun. 10, 2018)2 https://www.hederahashgraph.com/3 https://www.iota.org/4 https://www.iota.org/get-started/what-is-iota